


as we're becoming home

by yangonfire



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Angst, But also, Canon-Typical Violence, F/F, Fix-It, Fluff, Hurt/Comfort, Mutual Pining, and soft clexa, just without the canon typical stupid ass deaths, let's see there's lots of, really terrible things happen though so consider yourself warned, the whole kru really
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-03-04
Updated: 2017-03-04
Packaged: 2018-09-28 04:39:30
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,108
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10072121
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yangonfire/pseuds/yangonfire
Summary: @jroth your canon is stupid and it's not canon anymoreor,that one fix-it fic, f i n a l l y





	

**Author's Note:**

> ~~~~FLASHING RED LIGHTS AND SIRENS~~~~~  
> this first chapter contains some material that was very distressing for me to write so i can only assume it will be for you to read as well—mainly brutal violence and emotional trauma suffered by characters that we all love. i tried to shy away from anything gratuitous but that doesn't mean your mind can't fill in the blanks so PLEASE TAKE THIS WARNING SERIOUSLY and read at your own discretion.  
> ~~~~~END FLASHING RED LIGHTS AND SIRENS~~~~~
> 
> on that note, this fic begins the night of ascension day, and the scene in the throne room with the villagers who are holding octavia captive is the last thing from Fake Canon that's canon here. what exactly took place between then and the beginning of this story will be explained in future chapters. so here we go.

Polis is burning.

The biting smell of smoke is the first thing Clarke’s groggy mind latches onto when a shake to her shoulder drags her out of sleep.

“Lexa?”

“Get up, Clarke. You’re leaving Polis.” Lexa leans over her, tugging at her arm. Urgency tinges her tone. _“Now.”_

Clarke lets Lexa pull her up and to the edge of the bed, but her mind is still heavy with the fog of unconsciousness, and she rubs at her bleary eyes.

“Why? What’s going—”

“There’s no time to explain. Hurry and get dressed.”

For the first time, Clarke notices the guards standing behind Lexa—three of them, one holding up a torch, and though Lexa’s expression is placid as always, the flickering light illuminates tension in the set of her jaw. And Clarke really sees Lexa for the first time, too. Her hair is soft and loose over her shoulder, and her regal war coat is hanging open over a dark shirt and shorts which she must have worn to bed. Clarke looks back up into her eyes.

 _“You’re_ not dressed.”

A subtle tightening of her lips, then, “I’m not leaving.”

The realization blindsides her. This is goodbye. Her heart sinks heavier than she could have imagined.

“Please, Clarke. _Hurry.”_

Swallowing back disappointment, Clarke nods and slips past Lexa to grab her jacket, shirt, and trousers from where she’d left them hung over the back of a chair. When she moves behind the screen near the window to change her clothes, she catches a glimpse of the city. Her jaw falls slack.

Fires ravage the dark city beneath them. In places, entire rows of buildings are ablaze with flames pouring out of open windows. And the sky…. A caustic glow paints a storm of smoke so thick that even the moon’s clear light is suffocating behind it. The only time in her life she’s ever seen the sky like this was on the night that the missile struck Tondc. She never thought she’d see this sight again, not here. Not in Polis. Not so _soon_.

As Clarke disrobes behind the screen, she can hear Lexa speaking in hush to her guards, her voice low enough that all Clarke can discern is the stress that roughens its edges. Her feet are bare, and they pad quietly against the cold stone as she paces.

“Lexa.”

“Yes, Clarke?”

“What’s going on out there?”

A brief hesitation follows before Lexa answers her. “A mob has gathered around the tower.”

Clarke stands on her toes and cranes her neck so she can peek over the top of the screen at Lexa while she fumbles to turn her shirt right-side-out. “What? Why?”

“They want vengeance.”

Of course. “Against who?”

Clarke watches Lexa’s profile—she is looking pointedly away—and can’t help but notice her hesitation. “Skaikru. You’re not safe here anymore, Clarke. We need to get you out, through the tunnels beneath the tower.”

She starts to turn to her guards again, and maybe Clarke’s mind is still bogged down by sleep, but none of this makes sense and she refuses to cooperate until it does. “I don’t understand,” she says, and Lexa turns halfway back to her. “Is it the villagers who were in your throne room this morning?”

“We believe they instigated this, yes.”

“But you ordered them to leave Polis when they killed Titus.”

Lexa blinks twice, a flutter of lashes. “I did.”

“How the hell do they even know I’m still here?” Clarke demands. She buckles her belt at her waist and steps out from behind the screen, approaching Lexa. “I was supposed to be sent back, behind the blockade.”

In the dim light, Clarke almost misses the press of her lips, but then Lexa gives an aborted shake of her head, her jaw clenching. “You should have been,” Lexa says. She’s angry, no doubt with herself. “But all that matters now is that you get there, to the other side of it. You’ll be safe in Arkadia.”

“How?” Clarke moves to stand closer to her, and more directly in front of her so that she has no choice but to meet Clarke’s eyes. “How am I going to get through the blockade without being seen?”

Lexa reaches out, and her hand brushes lightly against Clarke’s elbow as she steps past her. “Come,” she says. “You need to cover your hair, disguise yourself.”

Still for a moment, Clarke watches Lexa with her mouth open but empty of words. She wants to protest against…something. Something wrong. _This_ is wrong; she knows it instinctively but she can’t place her finger on what could be causing her unease aside from fear of the journey that suddenly lies before her. She knows her feelings are not coming from that, but there’s nothing _else,_ so Clarke clenches her jaw shut and joins Lexa by the wardrobe. She rifles through it as Lexa speaks.

“Listen carefully.” Her voice is low and steady. “When you get out of the tunnels, continue east. You’ll come to a river.”

Clarke nods her head, shrugging on heavy jacket that she’s never worn. “I know it.”

“Good. Follow it north and it will lead you to a village. The southern line of the blockade passes through it. The hunters will be returning at dawn with their nightly kills, so if you can get there by that time, the scouts should assume you’re simply a hunter returning empty handed and they should have little reason to pay you any mind. After that you’ll only have to keep your head down for a little while, avoid drawing attention to yourself, and eventually you’ll be able to leave the village and get past the blockade without anybody giving you a second glance.”

Clarke swallows hard, mind reeling. “I don’t….” Shakes her head, starts again. “Why do I have to leave?”

“The people outside the tower want you dead,” Lexa says, her gaze piercing Clarke’s.

“And the people at the blockade don’t? Lexa, why can’t I just stay here with you?” Her voice comes out pleading, and her heart aches with how desperately she _wants_ that.

Clarke sees Lexa’s lips press together, and after a moment she releases a heavy breath, takes a small step forward, and slips her hand into Clarke’s with the lightest of pressure. “Clarke. You hid from everyone—Azgeda, Skaikru,” she says, and with the hint of a smile, “ _me_ —for months. All you need now is a day, maybe two.” Her fingers tighten around Clarke’s, a gentle squeeze. “You can do this.”

Clarke finds herself gripping Lexa’s hand. With a deep breath, and still with worry in her eyes that she knows must be easy to see, she nods. Lexa searches her eyes for a moment, seeming torn, but then she speaks in a soft voice.

“May we meet again.”

Not unlike the last time Clarke heard those words from those lips, Lexa’s mask falters and tears slip through the gaps, flooding her eyes but not spilling down her skin. Clarke stares hard, doesn’t let Lexa look away. She doesn’t want to be separated either, but something more than the pain of parting shimmers in Lexa’s eyes. Grief. Guilt. Even fear.

Clarke moves closer. “We _will.”_

But all Lexa does is lift her chin, and Clarke knows what that is—a show of confidence when she feels none. She’s no longer sure which of them is the one being comforted.

Then all at once, the hallway outside is filled with shouts and the clang of clashing swords. The door crashes open and Clarke jumps. Lexa’s head whips to the sound.

 _“Heda!”_ A guard stumbles into the room. _“Emo ste kom op!” They’re coming._

Lexa hesitates for only a second. _“Shil dou op.”_ The guards in the room move to obey her, closing the door and forming a wall, weapons drawn and raised. Lexa’s hands move to Clarke’s shoulders before she looks back at her, but when she does, her face has completely changed. Profound fear is etched into her features. The clenching in Clarke’s gut is a mirror of it as though she and Lexa are sharing a single emotion.

_They’re here for me._

“You have to hide, quickly,” Lexa says in a strained voice as she guides Clarke, almost pushes her, away from the bedroom door. “Get in the wardrobe.”

Pulse pounding in her ears, eyes darting between Lexa and the door, Clarke obeys her and steps up, pushing aside the clothes that hang there to make room for herself among the furs and fabrics. Lexa’s hands leave her shoulders and Clarke looks up just in time to see them come to rest on the wardrobe doors.

Just in time to see a tear roll down Lexa’s cheek.

“Goodbye, Clarke.” And before she can respond, the low creak of the doors shutting Clarke in the darkness is followed after a few seconds by another sound, just on the other side of the door. A quiet _thunk_ and the scrape of wood sliding against wood.

“Lexa?” The sound of the fight is drawing closer but Clarke presses her palm against the door. It doesn’t budge.

Lexa has barred her inside.

Clarke presses her back into the hanging clothing, breathing a few heavy breaths to settle her racing heart, not that it works. The noise of the battle outside the bedroom is muffled. She feels blind here in more ways than one, but there’s light seeping between the doors. Maybe if she just….

Wedging her finger into the small gap created by the rounded door corners, Clarke manages to pull one door closer to her by a quarter of an inch, and now she can see out into the dim, fire-lit room. A hairpin slice of it, anyway. She finds Lexa, standing a few feet behind her guards, defenseless if not for their blades.

But that shouldn’t matter. The mob is not here for Lexa.

Clarke bites her lip. It’s not right. She just doesn’t know what _it_ is.

And she doesn’t have a moment to pin it down because the doors burst open and armed men, shouting, unruly, stream into the room, but one voice rises above the rest.

_“Hod op!”_

Swallowing hard, Clarke shifts to see the mob through the crack. A man pushes his way to the front, black hair and beard streaked with silver, limping, leaning heavily on a club-headed walking stick. Semet, the man who killed Titus.

But…Titus hadn’t been his target, had he?

He stares at Lexa now, eyes glinting and ravenous. He paces like a wolf. Clarke can’t see both of them at once through the small crack, but she hears Lexa’s voice and moves again to watch her step forward, placing herself between the mob and her guards.

 _“Chil yu daun, Semet.”_   She’s firm, authoritative, but her voice is higher than Clarke is used to hearing it. She’s afraid. _“Nou dula disha op.” Don’t do this._

A smile flashes across Semet’s face. The conversation continues but Clarke’s focus is stolen by four men standing behind Semet. By their red velvet sashes. And Clarke’s stomach is a pit of ice, because those men are in the Commander’s Guard.

She realizes too late.

_“Hod em daun!”_

The sound of metal through flesh slices the air, and the gasp that escapes Clarke might have been audible if not for the man’s cry. She shifts her view just in time to see the first of Lexa’s bodyguards fall to the ground, run through by the sword of the second.

The third has seized Lexa from behind and pressed a knife to her throat.

“No….” The broken word falls from Clarke’s lips. Then louder. _“No.”_

But Semet bellows, _“Gon tri-de!”_ A roar from the mob drowns out every other sound.

And they’re pulling Lexa out of the room, out of Clarke’s sight.

Stunned, Clarke stares through the crack for a few heartbeats before she starts pounding on the wardrobe doors, kicking them, trying to break them open or break right through them. “Lexa!” she cries. “Bastards! Let her go!”

The sounds of the mob have disappeared by the time Clarke stills enough in the darkness to notice the tears on her face.

 

 

Lexa hardly feels the cold night air clawing at her skin.

Hardly feels the rope biting into her wrists.

The crowd is riotous, almost gleeful, and though they jostle her, jeer at her while they pull her through the streets, she can’t focus on them either.

Because terror—terror like she’s never experienced—is water up to her neck, an undertow dragging her down until it floods every inch of her. She doesn’t know if she’s keeping it out of her eyes or if they can all see it. She doesn’t think it matters, not anymore.

Somehow, she’s always known it would end this way.

People are clustered at the sides of the streets, some with eyes downcast, others looking on with grim satisfaction. Nearby, a child’s fearful voice. _“Heda!”_ Lexa looks to the side just soon enough to see his mother rush him into the dark doorway of their home, but she hears the same cry taken up by others, can see them where they huddle out of the way of the mob or lean out of upper story windows, calling out to her. Her heart breaks. Who will protect them now? They don’t want this, but it’s been chosen. Her fate is sealed.

And Clarke…. Clarke is trapped in the tower.

 _By you._ A bitter thought. Clarke could die up there. All Lexa wanted was to keep her safe.

Out of nowhere, a fist crashes into her face. Pain blinds her, and the impact throws her so far off balance that the next yank of the rope at her wrists makes her stumble, and she falls to the ground, unable to catch herself.

The man standing over her is yelling, but the ringing inside her skull muffles the words. Something about the massacre, a daughter lost. Lexa shakes her head, tries to clear it. The rope tugs on her wrists again and she knows she has to get up but her head is spinning. She only needs a moment….

But then there are hands on her shoulders. She jerks away instinctively—someone else is here to hurt her—but the hands push her up, right her, so she’s on her knees. She looks up.  
Indra.

_“Heda….”_

No. Indra won’t die for this too, for her loyalty. She can’t stop this anyway, and even if she could, she _shouldn’t_ because Lexa’s final duty is to die. But Indra knows that. Of course she does. The terrible truth is in her eyes.

Rough hands grab Lexa’s coat and pull her up, and Lexa realizes that only one thing matters now.

They start to pull her away from Indra but Lexa twists around to shout over her shoulder. “Find Clarke! She’s in the tower, get her out, get her to safety!”

And then Indra is lost to her sight. The rope is cutting into her wrists again. Her jaw is throbbing and her mouth is thick with the taste of her own blood. There is nothing for her to do now except to prepare to meet the end. She’s not ready to die, but she must be willing. She _must_ be. So she doesn’t resist, doesn’t pull back, doesn’t fight them as they drag her into a wide courtyard, where blazing fires illuminate the innumerable skeletal fingers of a hundred-year-old oak tree, towering above them.

 

 

Clarke’s knuckles are bloody, but the door still won’t give. She collapses back into the clothing hanging behind her. She gasps for breath, lets her head fall back and her eyes slide closed. Everything is silent.

Until she hears a groan.

That guard. He’s still alive.

“Hey!” she shouts, and she pounds on the door again, ignoring the sharp pain. “I need help! Please!”

Miraculously, he stirs where he lies on the floor, cranes his neck with another groan to look towards the wardrobe. He must have lost consciousness and is only now coming to.

“I’m trapped in here,” she pleads through the crack in the door. “Please, you’ve got to get me out.”

He’s motionless for a moment, but then he reaches out towards her, gripping at the stone floor with shaking fingers. It seems an agonizing hour to Clarke, but the man drags himself, inch by inch, across the room until he reaches the foot of the wardrobe. She tries not to notice the trail of blood he leaves behind him.

With a titanic effort and a groan of pain, the man pushes his failing body high enough off the floor that he can reach the handles of the wardrobe. The beam falls to the floor with a thud, and he collapses beside it.

The next moment, Clarke is out, on her knees beside him, instinct pressing her hands into the gash beneath his ribs to stem the flow of blood. There’s no hope for him. She knows that. But she’s never been one to accept these things so easily.

He coughs out a single word, deep red coloring his greying beard. _“Wanheda….”_

“Where did they take Lexa?”

“…Court…yard…. The Commander’s…Courtyard….”

Clarke nods. She knows the place. She’s about to stand when the guard’s hand closes around her wrist, the strength of his grip sudden and unexpected.

“Save her… _Wanheda_ …. Do…what I couldn’t.”

Her throat tightens, but she squeezes his hand and manages to speak. _“Yu gonplei ste odon.”_ And she stays only long enough to see him let his eyes slide shut.

 

 

She’s out of breath long before she reaches the bottom of the tower, but even when she does, even when she steps out into the night and breathes in cold air and smoke, she doesn’t stop. She can’t.

The light from the fires in the city is both a blessing and a curse. It lights her way, but steals her cover. Clarke pulls on her jacket hood, praying that she’ll make it through the city streets unnoticed, and starts toward the courtyard even though she has no idea what she’s going to do when she gets there.

The grounders think she has some kind of power over death. To them, she’s _Wanheda_ , and she commands death. Maybe their superstition is powerful enough to make them fear her.

She doubts it.

No, she’s a girl against a mob. And God does she hope she knows where she’s going. The image of Lexa being dragged out of the room is burned onto her vision like a bright light and it spurs her to move faster, faster, cutting between buildings and down empty alleyways, trying to ignore the smoke that cuts in her lungs.

The noise is her first signal that she’s getting close. Hooting and cheering, an uncouth sound. With an awful clenching in her stomach, she dashes forward and rounds the corner.

A huge tree with thick, sprawling limbs like the legs of some deformed spider is the first thing she sees, its pale bark painted a ruddy orange by the burning torches all throughout the square. The open space around the tree is clogged with people. She thinks she hears Semet shouting, whipping up the crowd into an even more fevered pitch.

The second thing she sees is Lexa. Stripped of her coat and surrounded, Lexa’s hands are tied, her arms pulled over her head by a rope that runs through a sort of pulley at the top of a towering wooden post. And the man behind her back, one hand on the side of her head, pinning her to the post, is holding something in the other. A bloody knife.

Pain flares in her stomach and makes her eyes sting, and Clarke elbows her way forward into the crowd. It’s like being swallowed. Most of them are taller than she is, and they’re all jostling each other, pumping their fists, waving bottles and torches and weapons in the air. But their bloodlust is suddenly pale in comparison to her own. Fear and fury tear into each other, a storm of emotions.

They’re killing her.

_Stop them._

You can’t save her.

_I’ll kill them!_

But less than halfway to the front of the crowd, a hand clamps over her mouth. Clarke’s cry is muffled and she tries to jerk around, fight free, but the arm that has seized her from behind around the shoulders is as hard as iron. She claws at it uselessly. Heart thundering in her ears, she’s dragged backwards despite her thrashing. Her desperate eyes find Lexa again. They’ve released her arms. Now they’re shoving her down, one man on either side of her, and she’s lost to Clarke’s sight. What are they _doing?_

She tries to scream but her assailant pulls her out of the crowd, around the corner of a building, before spinning her around, pushing her down to sit hard on the bottom step of a stairwell leading up the side of the building. Ready to kill with her bare hands, Clarke jumps to her feet and throws herself forward—and stops short. The shadows are heavier away from the torchlight, but there’s no mistaking the cropped hair, fang earring, and dark skin.

“You should not be here.” Indra’s voice is grim.

Clarke stares for a moment with wide, wild eyes before yanking her raised fist out of Indra’s grip. But before either of them can say another word, Clarke hears a new sound that cuts deep to her heart.

A metallic thud, and another, and another, rhythmic and relentless. Each is echoed by an awful cry of pain. _Lexa’s_ pain.

And Clarke feels every one like a dagger in her chest, agony so tangible that a strangled sob escapes her, and she frantically tries to push past Indra. Hard hands close around her arms.

“Let go!”

“No.”

“Indra, they’re killing her!”

Indra yanks her back and shoves her against the wall, stern and cold. “Yes. Her people are rejecting her rule. The Commander’s spirit must be released.”

The clangs continue and Clarke’s eyes are stinging with tears. “They _can’t…”_ she says, breathless, helpless.

Just then, a shout of many voices rings out from the direction of the courtyard.

_“Gon Heda!” For the Commander!_

Clarke’s head snaps to the sound of clashing weapons. She meets Indra’s startled eyes only for a brief moment before spinning on her heel. Ignoring Indra’s shout, Clarke dashes away from her and up the steps leading to the roof of the building that blocks her view of the courtyard. She crouches down, makes her way across the roof and falls to a knee behind the low wall that borders the top of the building. Heart hammering, she wipes at her eyes and searches first for Lexa, looks to the high pole at the center of the mob that’s surrounded by an open space ten feet across, but the crowd of people is blocking her sight and Lexa is nowhere to be seen. Then her eyes are drawn to the cause of the commotion.

There, on the far side of the square, a group of men and women with weapons drawn are falling on the mob. A rescue attempt, but Clarke’s hope is fleeting. They’re outnumbered—only thirty, perhaps, against the hundreds crowding the courtyard—and the mob recovers quickly from the shock of being ambushed.

The battle doesn’t last long.

 _“Lid em in hir!”_ It’s Semet’s voice, drunken and crazed, and Clarke watches in muted horror as members of the mob obey him, dragging the only three rebels still alive to the center of the mob and forcing them down to their knees.

Indra settles in a few feet from Clarke. Semet begins prowling back and forth in front of the captives, waving a bottle around in the air with one hand while he braces the other on his stick, and ranting something that Clarke can’t pick out from the noise of the mob.

“Clarke,” Indra says, her voice low, almost a growl. “Lexa’s last order to me was to get you out of the city alive. It’s too late to help her, but not to honor her wishes.”

Clarke’s words leap from her soul like nothing else is even conceivable, and they flood her bones with resolve as strong as steel. “She’s not dead. Not yet.” _She can’t be._ “And I’m not leaving without her.”

That’s when someone in the mob starts shouting.

_“Teik em op! Teik em op!”_

It spreads, a bloodthirsty chant— _lift her up._ Though Clarke doesn’t know what they mean by it, the words fill her with dread. She can’t see to the ground in that cleared space at the center of the mob, but she watches Semet wave an arm, giving a signal, and then four of his followers spring into action. Two of them grab one end the rope that hangs from the pulley. A woman takes the other end and bends over, out of Clarke’s sight. The last crouches down near the third and is lost to her as well. A moment drags on forever, filled with rowdy chanting, then the two men begin to pull on the rope. Lexa’s cries begin again.

And Clarke finally sees what they’ve done to her.

In shock, her hands fly to her mouth. The _monsters_ have stretched her arms wide across a beam of wood and driven nails through her hands and wrists to hold her to it. The rope, tied at the center of the beam, hauls her body up the length of the pole, above the crowd. She screams.

Tears fall, slip over Clarke’s hands, and she shakes her head as her whole body begins to shudder with sobs. “No, no, no, _no.”_

They raise her to the top of the pole. The two on the rope move to tie it down, and Clarke thinks for a moment—one _merciful_ moment—that they’re finished. She’s wrong. The woman grabs Lexa by the ankle, bends her leg at the knee and holds her foot flat against the pole. It’s only when the fourth raises his hammer that the horror of what is happening in front of her overwhelms the horror that glues her eyes to the sight.

She jerks around, back hitting the low wall, at the moment the hammering starts again.

“Bastards,” she chokes out into her hands, cringing. She struggles to breathe as sobs wrack her body. _“Bastards!”_

A near eternity passes before the pounding stops. Trembling, Clarke can only wait in awful anticipation for something worse to happen.

Semet’s voice is the next thing she hears. _“Hosh op!”_ he orders. _“En joken hosh op!”_ And the crowd quiets, enough that Clarke can hear Lexa, gasping. She grits her teeth, inhales a sharp, shaky breath, and turns back around.

With a sneer, Semet stands in front of the captives who kneel with swords pressed to their throats, waving his arm at the wooden cross upon which Lexa hangs. _“Ai yu heda op!”_ Behold your commander! He turns to her then, and, pointing with the hand that holds his bottle, he spits, _“Yu don frag emo op.”_

His men need no more permission than that. One by one, they slit the throats of their captives. Clarke winces as the bodies fall.

Semet turns back to the mob with crazed eyes. Raising his arms above his head, he bellows, _“Nou heda noumou!”_

The roar of the crowd is deafening. Clarke clenches her jaw, watches as Semet throws his head back and downs the dregs of his drink, and then he hurls the empty bottle at Lexa. It hits the pole above her head, shatters into a thousand pieces.

And Clarke has had enough.

“Indra,” she says, turning to her. It's a fight to keep her voice under control. “Listen to me, please. You said her people are rejecting her, but we’re her people too. _You_ are. Help me stop this.”

Clarke thinks that even if she didn’t know of Indra’s unwavering loyalty to her commander, she would have been able to see in the woman’s expression how much she wants this to end. Muscles in her jaw and her temple are clenching, working, and her eyes as she looks over the courtyard are grim. Her silence is pained, but finally she breaks it. “How? We are two against a mob.”

The smoke stinging Clarke’s eyes and throat gives her the idea. “Fire. We light these buildings on fire and they’ll be forced to clear out.”

“We could burn the whole city down.”

“Lexa is more important than a bunch of damn buildings!”

At last, Indra looks at her, and Clarke can tell she’s nearly won her over, that Indra wants to rescue her commander.

Clarke leans forward, imploring. “Please, Indra. Lexa needs you.”

A pause, and Indra looks back out, back to Lexa. Then, “Behind the tree is an old barn, used to store feed for horses. Hay. It will go up easily.”

Hope is a dim, desperate spark burning within Clarke’s hammering heart as she leaps to her feet and bounds down the stone steps. She doesn’t even spare a moment to see if Indra is following. Keeping out of sight, she scurries in a crouch around the buildings that ring the square until she reaches the one that Indra had told her about. Tall, built of thick wooden planks, the old building is exactly what she needs. She bursts in through the door. Sure enough, the high stalls lining each walkway hold piles of hay, straw, and grain. The mob outside is rowdy, celebratory. _Distracted_. But Clarke has no way to start a fire.

Just as she turns back to the entrance, Indra steps inside, holding aloft two torches.

“From the courtyard,” she says, and hands one to Clarke.

The barn is ablaze in minutes.

Smoke burns in Clarke’s lungs, and she stumbles out of the building after Indra, coughing, but she keeps moving. Beside the barn is another structure built of wood—a shop, maybe. Clarke only knows that if it can burn, it will.

By the time the second building is on fire, she begins to hear a new tone in the noise of the crowd. Alarm. It’s working, but the most malicious part of her hopes that not all of them get out in time. These beasts deserve to burn for what they’ve done.

They move on. The next two buildings take far too much precious time before they’re alight, and with every minute that passes, Clarke is painfully aware of Lexa’s prolonged suffering. But she forces herself to stay focused, not to look whenever she passes an alley or an unshuttered window

“Some of them are leaving.” Clarke pauses at the sound of Indra’s voice, lifts her torch from the pile of wood—a table, chairs, a large barrel—that she’d been trying to light in the fifth building, and she hurries to the nearest window. Sure enough, the fire is spreading into the courtyard, claiming market stalls, fences, anything that will burn, and the mob has crowded itself to the opposite side of the square from the burning buildings though they still nearly fill the open space. Many of them are pointing to the blaze, worry in their faces, and some at the edges are retreating back into the dark streets.

She finds Semet in the crowd, still standing near the cross. Staring silently up at the flames, seeming almost contemplative, he doesn’t move until one of his people approaches him and speaks something that Clarke can’t hear over the roar of the fire and the noise of the crowd. But she sees Semet nod, and then strains to hear his voice when he calls out.

 _“Oso ste odon hir.” We’re done here._ He turns, pauses for a moment, looking up at Lexa, then spits on the ground beneath her.

Anger seethes in Clarke’s stomach as she watches him leave with his mob. If she truly commands death, then she vows to herself that he’ll die with a bullet in his skull.

For now, she has something more vital to worry about, and when her eyes fall on Lexa where she still hangs, Clarke nearly falls apart. But Indra stops her with a hand on her arm before she can take two steps.

“I’ll see if anyone is still watching.”

She slips outside without a sound. Though Clarke had avoided watching Lexa before, it’s all she can do now. Her head hangs, her wounds bleed, but it’s the stillness of her body that freezes Clarke’s fury over with dread. She’s still alive. She has to be.

Each passing second is torture, but eventually Indra returns, and Clarke doesn’t wait for her permission before she dashes out the door, rounds the corner and sees the empty courtyard ahead of her. Sees Lexa.

Clarke runs to her.

“Lexa!” The cry tears from her throat as if her soul was leaping to cross the distance between them. When she approaches the cross, she drops her torch to the ground and reaches out to take hold of Lexa’s ankles, gazing upwards. Her skin is cold, though no colder than the night air, and Clarke can feel her trembling, barely perceptible. She’s alive, but that doesn’t lessen the distress that tightens Clarke's throat, and her eyes sting with smoke and tears. Lexa’s head hangs heavy, and long hair obscures her face. “Lexa? Can you hear me?”

Indra steps up beside her, still holding her torch.

“How…how do we get her down?” Clarke asks, and she can’t keep the tremor out of her voice.

Looking up and down the pole for a moment, Indra shoulders Clarke aside, though not ungently. She leans in, holds her torch closer, inspecting the wounds in Lexa’s feet that Clarke can hardly bear to look at, the thick iron which pins flesh to wood.

“The widest part of the nail is already through,” she mutters, then bends down to set her torch, and some dark bundle, on the cobblestones.

 _“God,_ be careful!” Clarke chokes out, pressing the back of her hand against her mouth, but Indra has already pulled Lexa’s foot off the end of the nail. She lets the leg hang down, takes Lexa by the other foot.

Clarke hurries forward when Indra is finished, grabbing hold of Lexa’s legs, hugging them to her chest and lifting them as well as she can to take pressure off of Lexa’s hands and wrists. She hears Indra unsheathe a knife and step around the pole.

“I’ll get the rope.”

But Clarke barely hears her. She’s preoccupied with trying to breathe, trying not to fall apart. Clamping her eyes shut, she lets her head fall forward enough that her lips press to the skin just above Lexa’s bare knee, and she waits there, still, trying to let the quiet of that touch drown out the noise of the storm inside her and the storm in the city. She can’t stop being strong yet.

It feels like she never can.

Indra’s voice breaks through the walls Clarke is hastily building. “Let her down.” And Clarke braces against the added weight that’s suddenly on her arms. Holding tight and stepping back slowly, Clarke uses the slack Indra gives her to lower Lexa’s body until she can set her on the ground, slumped against the pole.

Scrambling forward over uneven ground, Clarke kneels beside Lexa’s motionless body, her arms still outstretched over the wooden beam. “Lexa?” Clarke says in a hush. She reaches out with both hands to cup her chin, lift her head, and for a moment, the darkness tricks her eyes into seeing Lexa’s pattern of war paint, but then the realization hits her. Blood. Sticky and still warm, black blood has poured down her forehead and the side of her face from a wound at her hairline.

Clarke stares in mute shock until Indra drops down on the other side of Lexa. “How did this happen?”

Indra glances over for only a moment before answering curtly, laying a hand on the beam. “It doesn’t matter. Hold this steady.”

She gives a quick nod and reaches around Lexa on either side of her to brace the beam back against the pole, and Lexa’s head falls forward to the crook of Clarke’s neck. Clarke doesn’t watch when Indra takes a hold of Lexa’s forearm and hand, but she can’t block out the sound.

When Lexa's arms are free, Clarke lets the beam drop to the ground, and she wants to wait long enough to inspect Lexa’s many wounds—bandage them, if she can find something to use—but Indra is already pulling one of Lexa’s arms over her shoulders. “What will you do when they find the empty cross? They’ll blame Skaikru and march on Arkadia.”

“Why would they blame us?”

“No one else is brazen enough.”

Clarke stares at her for a moment, but pulls Lexa’s other arm over her neck. “Help me get her out of sight.”

Together they lift her, and they haul her across the courtyard, her feet dragging over the stones and her head hanging down, chin to chest. Clarke helps Indra lower Lexa’s body as gently as they can when they reach a building that has yet to catch fire. “Stay with her.”

Clarke jogs back to the cross, pausing only when the glint of a glass bottle catches her eye. She picks it up. Dark liquid sloshes inside of it. Good.

Three bodies lay on the ground nearby, blood pooling around their heads from their slashed throats and turning the cracks in the cobblestones to crimson streams, and Clarke’s eyes drops to the body of the woman. She grits her teeth but doesn’t hesitate. She stoops down to take the body under the arms and drag it to the cross, kneels beside it and strips it of anything that won’t burn—a belt, a bracelet, boots with metal buckles. A knife. The nails are wedged too tightly into the wood to remove them, but she has a knife.

 _“Yu gonplei ste odon,”_ she whispers.

She unsheathes the small blade and takes hold of the dead woman’s wrist. Clenches her jaw. If she stops to think, she’ll vomit.

So it doesn’t take her long. When she’s finished, the holes, the tears, in the flesh are jagged but they’ve done the job, and the corpse’s lifeless arms are stretched over the beam. Lifting the body up the cross is difficult, but she manages to do it and to tie the rope down. She wipes cold sweat from her brow., doesn’t bother with the feet—she can’t make herself do that again—but shatters the glass bottle on the pole as she passes it to retrieve her torch, splashing alcohol across the wood.

The flames from her torch lap it up in an instant, and Clarke drops it at the bottom of the pole. When she turns, stuffing the sheathed knife in her pocket, the torch Indra had set down catches her eye, and her gaze falls to the bundle beside it. She pauses and stoops down, hand meeting rough fabric. Lexa’s coat. The mob had stripped her of it, but Indra must have found it. Clarke picks up the coat and hurries back to where Indra is waiting.

Clarke doesn’t meet her eyes. The weight of her stare is more than enough to carry. “It’s not empty anymore,” she mutters, kneeling beside Lexa’s motionless form.

Indra says nothing of the blood on Clarke’s hands, the body that is now burning on the cross. “What is your plan now, sky girl?”

“She’ll die if these wounds aren’t bandaged.” In vain, she tries to keep her jaw from clenching. Lexa needs the medicine they have at Arkadia, but that isn’t even worth entertaining as an option. “And I don’t know if she can survive any kind of journey away from Polis.”

“I know a place, here in the city. She won’t be discovered.”

Clarke nods once and bends down to pull Lexa’s arm over her shoulder. Together, they carry her away from the courtyard, away from the firelight, through alleys and dark streets to avoid being seen by the small groups of looters and rioters that still prowl through the streets. Where Semet’s mob has gone, Clarke doesn’t know, but the sound of distant rioting still disturbs the cold night. The city, however, in the direction they move, is growing quieter, and the smoke less suffocating.

But the growing silence does nothing to calm Clarke’s agitated mind. If anything, it gives her space to panic. She grips Lexa’s forearm, clings to her waist, wrestles with her own fear and fights to replace it with the thing that's furthest from her mind—hope.

Before long, Indra leads them down a narrow street, lined by high brick walls and almost entirely unlit by the fires that still devour the center of the city. It’s dark enough that Clarke can barely make out the refuse piled on both sides of the alley, the ropes crisscrossing overhead and strung with tattered cloth like an old, torn canopy.

She doesn’t see the archway, shadow against shadow, that is recessed into the bricks until Indra turns them towards it and reaches out for the handle of a worn metal door. It screeches on rusty hinges when she hauls it open. The silence sends a shudder down Clarke’s spine when it breaks, and she looks reflexively back towards the empty alley entrance.

Indra closes the door behind them, and it’s dark inside, but less than it had been under the clouds of smoke. A faint, ruddy glow that can only be distant firelight flickers and bounces off the walls.

“What is this place?” Clarke asks in a hush,

But before Indra can answer, another voice calls out from up ahead.

“That you, egg-head?”

They freeze in their tracks at the sound.

“Turn back,” Indra says, an urgent hiss. “No one can know that the commander still lives.”

But Clarke hesitates. She _knows_ that voice, but...it can’t be.

Again, the voice. “Uh, a little help? Whoever you are?”

_“Clarke.”_

“Wait,” she whispers. “I think it’s okay, I know him.”

“Hellooo?”

Clarke glances over at Indra. “Stay here, let me make sure it’s safe.”

Slipping out from under Lexa’s arm, Clarke tiptoes along the winding passage, the light growing stronger with each step until she rounds a corner and one of the double doors ahead of her is ajar. Candles, that’s all she can see through the gap

She keeps moving forward until she reaches the door that sits closed, then, cautious, moves her head around it to look into the room. Torches, a large metal box of some kind, what looks like old boxes and garbage piled to the ceiling in strangely organized stacks. And….

“Murphy?”

_“Clarke?”_

He lifts his head higher, trying to get a vertical view of her from where he lays on the ground. As she hurries forward into the room, she can see that he’s tied to a chair that has been tipped over.

“Well I’ll be floated,” he says. “Maybe this shit pile can answer prayers after all.”

She drops down to her knees in front of him, not bothering to ask what he’s talking about. She pulls out the small knife she’d taken off the corpse earlier and starts sawing at the ropes that bind his hands. One of his eyes is swollen half-shut and his bare torso is covered in welts and dried blood, but, well, none of that has been exactly out of the ordinary for any of them since they’ve been on the ground. “Is anyone else down here with you?”

“Nice to see you, too.”

“Murphy.”

“No, no, that bald guy hasn’t been around all day.”

Clarke blinks, and pauses her efforts to free his ankle from its binds. “You don’t mean Titus, do you?”

“Didn’t tell me his name. Some kind of zealot, though. Robe, tattoos on his head.”

She nods. “And he was the only one who’s been here?”

“Yeah, why?”

Clarke turns her head to call over her shoulder. “Indra, it’s safe. You can bring her down here.”

With one final tug, she cuts through the last of the ropes that tie him to the chair, and then immediately she stands back up and heads back to the door of the room. Indra steps into the doorway just as Clarke reaches it, straining at the weight of Lexa’s body in her arms.

Clarke can feel her heart rate step up its pace when her eyes fall on Lexa’s pale, bloodied face. She has to work quickly, but with what? “Lay her down,” she says, spinning on her heel to scan the room, “uh...here.” That long wooden table will have to do, and Clarke jogs to it, pushing aside yellow candles and stacks of old papers, some of which slide off the table and fall to the ground with a quiet rustling. “Lay her on her side,” Clarke instructs as Indra approaches, but she’s distracted already, glancing around the room for something, anything at all, that she could use to care for Lexa. The wounds need to be cleaned first, but everything in this room looks dirty. There is fire—the torches—and that could be useful but she doesn’t know if there’s water to be found anywhere near this place which they could heat with it.

Murphy’s voice interrupts her frantic thoughts. “What’s going on, Clarke?”

“It’s a long story,” she answers him absently, hurrying to the other side of the room where she sees a jumble of shelves and cabinets.

“Who’s that?”

This time, it’s Indra who answers him, and her voice would have been a threat on its own even if her words were not. “The commander, and if you speak a word of this to anyone, I’ll cut out your tongue so you’ll never say another word again.”

There’s a brief silence, broken only by the sound of Clarke rummaging through the bins and boxes stacked on the shelves, but she hears Murphy mutter, “Charming people, you grounders.”

This conversation is pointless. “Indra,” Clarke says, pulling open the creaky doors of a small wardrobe. “I’m gonna need water— _clean_ water—and since I don’t have antibiotics it would be best if we added salt to it. Do you think you can get those things?”

There’s a brief pause, then: “I’ll try.”

Footsteps trail off, and Clarke slams the wardrobe door shut. Frustrated and failing to outpace her growing desperation, Clarke clenches her teeth and moves to the next place to search, where she lifts a heavy box off the shelf and sets it on the floor with a thud, tipping it on its side with grunt of effort. Its contents spill over the concrete floor and dust spills into the air, and Clarke drops to her knees to sort through it all. Strangely-shaped stones, an empty, metal strongbox with rusted hinges, a broken sword. Scraps of old cloth, scraps of rust-eaten metal.

“Murphy.”

“Yeah?”

“Did Titus have anything in this room that isn’t _garbage?”_

“Seems like that’s all the guy needed.”

Clarke sits back on her heels, balling her hands into fists. None of this is any good. They’ll have to go back out into the city, steal from a healer’s hut if—

“Well actually….”

She turns her head, watches Murphy cross the room to that large metal box that sits atop the short stairs near the back of the room.

“He keeps something shut up in here that he seemed all protective over.” He stoops over and reaches for the bottom of the box. The entire side of it is a hatch, and when he pulls it up, Clarke can see that it opens on hydraulic struts. Definitely not grounder-made, then. In fact, now that she’s focusing on it she realizes that it looks like some kind of outdated, rusty landing module that was launched from a space station. “Yeah, this,” Murphy says, and reaches inside. “Got no idea what’s in it, but….”

Clarke pushes herself to her feet and hurries over to him as he pulls out a steel box like an oversized briefcase. Unlike everything else in the room, this has been kept in immaculate condition, and the metal gleams softly in the torchlight. Though her hopes are low about its contents being of any use, she holds her hands out to take it and Murphy passes it to her. It’s lighter than she’d expected it to be.

Kneeling on the cold stone floor, Clarke sets the case on its side, flips open two latches that hold it shut, and—with a silent plea in her heart—lifts the lid.

Her first thought is that it’s a display case of some kind. Plush, burgundy velvet lines the lid, and is raised up from the bottom half of the case, creating padded protection on both sides of a small, metal container like a sardine tin, or an old-fashioned cigarette case that she’d seen in black and white films on the Ark, but this is emblazoned with a dark red, hazy image of a skull, wearing...is that Lexa’s headpiece? Clarke delicately lifts the small box from its velvet cushion to look closer, and yes, it’s a picture of that small cog Lexa wears to mark her as the commander. Swallowing back the feeling she gets at seeing it ornamenting a skull, Clarke opens the box. It’s empty. Useless.

She closes it again and sets it in the open lid of the steel case, her heart sinking, but going through the rest of the contents is as good as any other plan she has, so she lifts the velvet-lined tray which the skull box had rested on. It appears to also act as a second lid—a divider that separates the velvet display from everything else in the case.

And her jaw drops.

Bandages.

_...Bandages?_

“Oh my god,” she whispers, reaching out to run her fingers over the white cloth to see if it’s real—to see if she’s not hallucinating. She _never_ gets this lucky. There are bandages, and tied-up bundle of burlap which she unrolls to find scalpels and crude forceps and various other medical instruments. There’s a glass bottle which she uncorks to smell strong alcohol. And in a leather pouch—a suture needle and tough, thick thread.

Which she suddenly can’t see from the flood of tears in her eyes.

“Well that’s, uh…” Murphy says, “fortunate. Assuming you’re trying to save her life.”  
She takes a shaky breath, then wipes her eyes quickly on her sleeve and picks up the whole box to carry it over to the table where Lexa’s still body lays. As she sets down the case by Lexa’s head, she lets her gaze drop to Lexa’s face, and instantly she has to swallow back a knot in her throat and blink back tears. Two fingers pressed to Lexa’s throat find a light pulse, and she has to tell herself that Lexa is stable, for now. None of her injuries are life-threatening on their own, and though the collective loss of blood could become a cause for concern, she doesn’t let herself stress over that since she can’t start closing the wounds until they’ve been cleaned. Losing her cool wouldn’t do anyone any good, and least of all, Lexa. With a feather-light touch, Clarke trails her fingers from Lexa’s neck over her jaw, traces her cheekbone.

“You’re going to be alright,” she whispers.

A shudder of a sigh escapes her. Time to get to work.

 

 

Clarke’s eyes are getting heavy, beginning to slip closed, until she hears a quiet groan.

Lexa had flinched more than once while Clarke had worked on her—at the contact of the salty water to the wounds from the nails and the knife, or at the needle tugging on her torn skin—but had never fully regained consciousness through the process, and this is the first time since Clarke had set down the needle that she has shown signs of life beyond breathing. After Clarke had finished her duties as doctor, she took up the role of nurse, trying to keep Lexa comfortable with some cloaks and jackets that they’d found in a closet, rolling one up under her head for a makeshift pillow and laying several over her body to keep her warm. Indra now stands guard down the stone hallway at the outer door, Murphy dozes in the far corner of the room, and Clarke has been sitting at Lexa’s side, her head resting on her arms which are crossed on the table.

She’s upright and alert, now. Lexa’s eyes are still closed, but as Clarke watches her, a grimace overcomes her face, and Clarke can see new tension in her body.

“Lexa?” She pulls her head forward a few inches, curling in on herself with a groan. A pang of guilt twists Clarke’s stomach, but though there’s nothing she can do to alleviate the pain Lexa is waking to, perhaps she can help her wake without fear.

As gently as she can manage, she reaches out to touch Lexa’s upturned wrist, her fingers brushing the undamaged skin between the bandage around her hand and the one a little further down on her arm.

“Lexa?” she says again in a soft voice. “Lexa. Can you hear me? It’s...it’s okay, I know you’re hurting but you’re safe.” Lexa stirs again, squeezes her eyes shut more tightly, so Clarke keeps talking. “You’re safe. You’ll be alright, I’m going to make sure of it.”

And, finally, Lexa’s eyes flutter open.

Relief washes over Clarke and a smile pulls at her mouth. “Hey,” she whispers, and she leans down a little to be closer to Lexa’s eye level, her thumb brushing over the skin of her wrist. Lexa’s face twists in pain as another groan escapes her, but when she opens her eyes again, her eyes glance around the room for a few seconds before she raises them to meet Clarke’s. And Clarke hates to ask her these questions, but she needs to know how serious the blow to Lexa’s head really was. “Do you know where you are? Do you...remember what happened?”

She holds Lexa’s gaze, and she doesn’t know what she expects. She’s never seen Lexa deal with trauma like this before. But whatever she could have imagined, it isn’t the look on Lexa’s face, the anguish that floods her eyes, the betrayal that crushes her bone-weary voice when she finally speaks.

“What have you _done?”_

**Author's Note:**

> don't hate me
> 
> translations of my probably crappy trigedasleng:  
> "Emo ste kom op" — They're coming  
> "Shil dou op" — Guard the door  
> "Hod op" — Wait  
> "Chil yu daun" — Stand down  
> "Nou dula disha op" — Don't do this  
> "Hod em daun" — Seize her  
> "Gon tri-de" — To the tree  
> "Yu gonplei ste odon" — .....you know what that means  
> "Gon heda" — For the commander  
> "Lid em in hir" — Bring them here  
> "Teik em op" — Lift her up  
> "En joken hosh op" — Everybody shut the fuck up  
> "Ai yu heda op" — Behold your commander  
> "Yu don frag emo op" — You killed them  
> "Nou heda noumou" — Commander no longer  
> "Oso ste odon hir" — We're done here
> 
> (yangonfire @ tumblr dot com)


End file.
